With Ellen's skillful hand and practiced eye, that piece of bark appears to be iced over with a subtly-colored frost straight out of Lewis Carroll. That piece is at once Alice's looking glass and at the same time it's the glorification of what it is to be a tree.

Ellen Blakeley started working with shattered glass mosaics in the '90s. She was walking down a street near her home in San Francisco when she came upon a vandalized bus shelter. Somebody had shot out the safety glass window of a bus shelter with a BB gun and the shards lay sparkling on the sidewalk. She picked up a handful of the glass pieces and with a little consideration she found a new direction for her art. From a vandal's careless destruction on a San Francisco sidewalk, a body of beautiful work was born.

Ellen Blakeley makes show-stopping fine art mosaics, that much is true. Her work's also available in custom colors, shapes and sheets for use in homes and commercial spaces. You can buy her work through a network of tile showrooms nationwide and they are listed on her website here.

What follows is a series of images from Blakeley's current collection. Imagine how some of these patterns would look as a back splash, a wall or a fireplace surround. My mind reels from this stuff.

What an amazing and original idea these patterns represent. Any part of this collection would add depth and a story to a lot of the projects I work on. You know, sometimes you just need a little of that Looking Glass mystique. You can see more of Ellen Blakeley's collections on her website. Go take a look and let me know what you think.